Survey Says: Bonner Breaks Stereotypes

Every year, the Bonner Scholarship Program require students to raise awareness to different kinds of issues on campus to improve community living quality. This year, four students from the Bonner Scholarship Program at Concord University,Olga Novikova from Russia, Ina Nikolli from Albania, Willa Hardy from West Virginia, and Elmoeyede Ebi-Bekrine from Mauritania, formed a group called Race and Ethnicity Issue Based Team to raise awareness about race and ethnicity stereotypes on the university's campus. 

Photo by Linh Dinh

This project urges participants to learn more about race and ethnicity by completing a survey provided about basic stereotypes and then determining whether or not the stereotypes are true or false. The survey was provided on Wednesday, April 8 in the Ground Lobby of the Jean & Jerry L. Beasley Student Center for any interested participants. 

“Race and ethnicity are big issues nowadays and so broad to analyze, therefore I thought that there were so many aspects that could be analyzed and taken into consideration,” Nikolli, a junior in Pre-Med and Biology, said. She then added, “Stereotypes are all around us and like it or not, it's a bit impossible to avoid them. However, everyone, me included, can make an effort to never use them as a way to define people in our community.”

According to the American Psychology Association (APA), "racial stereotypes are automatic and exaggerated mental opinions that we hold about all members of a particular racial group." When people stereotype people based on race, they do not take into account individual differences. Because racial stereotypes are so rigid, people tend to ignore or discard any information that is not consistent with the stereotype that has been developed about the racial group. 

For Novikova, a junior in Tourism, Hotel and Travel Industry Management, the reason her group chose this issue for further exploration was because “All of us come from different cultures and everybody has faced some kind of a stereotype about them based on their race, so that's why we wanted to show everyone that sometimes your conceptions about a particular race or culture might be wrong based on some common stereotypes. We are also working on our required Bonner project and collecting data for our little research.” 

Willa Hardy, a junior in Chemistry and Biology added, “There is a lot of racial diversity on campus and with racial diversity comes stereotypes, so that seemed like the perfect idea.” 

Ebi-Bekrine, a senior in Geography with a minor in Political Sciences, shared his opinions on stereotypes, saying, “Some judge you before even knowing you[…]based on your color or ethnicity or cultural background.”

Hardy believed that, in general, Concord students do have the wrong perceptions of international students. “I cannot say that everyone does, but a lot of other students see internationals as either really hardworking or huge into parties, or extremely rich or very poor. Sometimes, students don't think of any options 'in between,' which is where most international students fit in, to be honest.”

The event attracted quite a buzz from Concord students and gave unexpected results. 49% of the participants felt like they were identified with the right stereotypes and 51% did not fit in with the race or ethnicity they were identified as. “We expected more wrong results because we chose the most common stereotypes on purpose to prove that only those [stereotypes alone] don't define you. There are many other factors that should be taken in concern,” Novikova said. 

Hardy agreed. “We actually thought more students would get 'Wrong!' which would mean their race did not match the race given to them by the stereotype survey," she explained 

The survey consisted of 50 stereotypical statements such as "I play musical instruments" or "I eat tacos." Each stereotype belonged to a color group of yellow, green, blue, red and pink and these color groups will determined which race and ethnicity one most fits into as far as stereotypes are concerned. Yellow is identified with Asians, blue is White, Green is Black, Pink is Latinos and Red is Middle Easterners. Matching the number of most stereotypes to the color group, one will be given their predicted race and ethnicity. 

The goal of this project is to raise awareness of race and ethnicity stereotyping and to prove that they don’t define any individual and help people move away from those stereotypes. The survey event was just a first step of the awareness movement. Through the survey, the group learned that Concord students actually communicate a lot with international students and therefore learn about their cultures. 

“I think they don't have a wrong perspective, but just maybe don't know enough about our cultures or countries, which is totally understandable because there are so many different ones that it's impossible to know everything,” Novikova explained. 

Ebi-Bekrine added he was hoping that the project will close the big gap between local residents and international students in terms of friendship and spark some interests for both sides to get to know more about each other.

Novikova shared that she personally didn’t feel offended by any stereotypes. “I actually like when people tend to define me by them. Stereotypes about me are usually always wrong. Based on how I look people think I'm from Spain, Brazil or Peru, which is very wrong. But it's very exciting for me to hear when they guess where I'm from.”

In contrast, Hardy felt mostly offended by negative stereotypes, “especially those that are not true to me but are true for my friends of another race. Society is saying that something that applies to me/my race shouldn't apply to them/their race, but it does. I do feel that people would treat me differently because of stereotypes especially in terms of expectations. For example, in a sports competition, because of my race, stereotypes say that I am good at sports and I feel that people would hold me to a higher standard than someone of another race, solely because of that.” Moreover, Hardy has been identified with certain stereotypes that expected to do things “I could not do, eat things I did not want to eat, and not do things I wanted to do, due to the simple fact that stereotypes said I should.”

Novikova was happy with the results and the attention the project got for only one day. “People were just coming exactly for the purpose of filling it and for finding out what race they turn out to be. We could see how really interested they were. So based on this we can say that our project was successful.”  The group of four will soon present the long-awaited project to fellow Bonner Scholars as well as the Concord community.